Correspondent's diary

Forests of the will

Correspondent's diary, day two: a deal that makes slowing deforestation easier is a prize worth fighting for at Cancún

AS THE last day of the Cancún climate talks dawns, there is some cautious hope in the air. With a much better atmosphere than Copenhagen, and some hard but productive negotiating sessions, there's a sense that, while hurdles remain, there is a real chance of leaving with a result. And the result most on people's minds, from the president of Mexico on down, is a deal on forests.

Within the negotiations the possibility of creating a new “Climate fund” is also seen as both a fairly big step forward and one that might actually be achieved. And different nations have all sorts of different specific requirements, the balancing of which will doubtless take the meeting well past its official closing time of six o'clock this evening. But as far as the world outside is concerned a deal to reduce deforestation and associated ills, known as REDD+, stands the best chance of generating headlines and happiness, as long as the proceedings do not break down decisively over some other issue. “What would stop it?” asks Brazil's environment minister Izabella Teixeira rhetorically. “I hope, nothing.”

A REDD deal would be a good thing both for the world and the UN climate process, which sorely needs an achievement. Deforestation, which continues at the rate of a football field a second, according to almost everyone who speaks on the subject, is a huge source of greenhouse gases. Plausible reductions in emissions from avoiding deforestation are far larger than the sort of reductions which can easily be made by slowing the industrial production of carbon dioxide in the short run. And reducing deforestation removes a threat to the livelihoods and cultures of indigenous people, as well as preserving a lot of doubtless delightful wildlife. A deal which helped secure and accelerate recent advances on the issue would be worth some trumpeting.

But deals are only the beginning. Norway, which thanks to its moral seriousness, dedicated diplomacy and stacks of petrokroner has been playing something of a blinder on forest conservation in recent years, has entered a number of bilateral agreements whereby it pays for forest conservation in a REDD-like manner. One of the beneficiaries of this spending is Guyana, which has committed to forgo a certain amount of deforestation. But as Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana's president, complained quite heatedly when sharing a stage with Norway's prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, at a side event at Cancun, despite having signed up for the first tranche of the forest-abnegation a year ago, Guyana still hasn't seen any of the promised money.

The complaint wasn't aimed at Mr Stoltenberg, with whom, Mr Jagdeo is keen to stress, he enjoys a very good relationship. Norway paid the money in question to the World Bank a year ago for onwards transmission. His irritation wasn't even really aimed, Mr Jagdeo later said, at Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, though it seems that much of the delay he objects to is due to passing the money through the careful checks and oversights of the World Bank system. The president wanted to communicate his frustration to the audience in general, which contained a lot of business people, politicians, policy makers and non-government types.

What Mr Jagdeo wanted to stress was that for a recipient country REDD is not a simple matter of getting some cash and some invitations to speak to the great and the good. It involves spending political capital to get all sorts of interest groups on board. And anything that goes wrong and diminishes the charms of the project—such as the money to buy a host of promised solar panels for people's roofs, which he says will be one of Guyana's first investments—hurts the process.

Mr Stoltenberg, like many in the north, has developed a great devotion to “results-based” development assistance, in which the donors see what they are getting. Mr Jagdeo wants some results based responses from the Bank. Both politicians know results are needed to keep the good work up, though they themselves may see little direct reward from their success: Mr Stoltenberg said that Norway's extremely high levels of development assistance (more than 1% of GDP) are not domestically popular, and that both main opposition parties would cut them; Mr Jagdeo, term limited, is meant to have left the presidency by this time next year.

Their message was that even when it seems simple, with all the money coming from a willing donor, halting deforestation is still a taxing political process. With its complex blend of emissions targets, counterfactual scenarios against which to measure them, attention to the livelihoods of those affected, conflation with other environmental goals, need for international financial flows and negotiated requirements for the monitoring and verification of the good that is done, the REDD process is, in a way, a microcosm of all the broader problems facing climate diplomacy.

Getting a REDD deal in Cancun should help the fight against deforestation in many places, as long as the deal is sensibly and sensitively fleshed out over the coming months and years. Some areas are as yet vague, and others, including perhaps the details of how things should be financed, may be vagued up yet further in order to get through the conference's final plenary session. This is probably to the good; easier to get the details right, including important ones on the vexed question of how to stop demand for wood from simply being displaced from protected places to unprotected ones, away from the pressure of deadlined negotiations.

But though such a deal would be good, it would be a recipe for action, not action itself. And everything will grind to a halt pretty quickly if the subsequent action doesn't yield real results. For many observers of climate negotiation, political will is needed at the beginning of the process, invoked simplistically as something which might take negotiations from where they are to where people want them to be. Mr Jagdeo sees things differently. For him political will comes before negotiations. And it fades if not fed with results.

Ahh yes the poor Economist Journalist was forced to go to Cancun to cover the Climate Change summit where 15,000 people are basking under mostly sunny skies and 75 degrees by a resort paradise where they are fed Lobster by the boatfuls.

Forget the poor peasants outside who subsist on beans and rice...the remnants of a great civilization that was casually obliterated 500 years ago by the Europeans...don't mind them - there are barricades to keep the great unwashed out.

Forget the poor British citizens (and European Citizens and American citizens) who are all living in a frozen tundra of global warming....yes it's projected to be the coldest winter in 100 years despite the fact that the $50million dollar MetOffice super computer projected a super wram winter (hint, the CRU folks created the computer program).

So yes dear correspondent, please by all means:

- enjoy the nice room
- enjoy the nice linens
- enjoy the lobster, caviar
- enjoy the Mexican Tequila and Cerveza (beer)...finest stuff in the world
- enjoy the sun
- enjoy the warmth
- enjoy the white sands
- enjoy the scuba diving (it's fantastic)
- visit Chichen Itza so you can see the remains of the once great Maya civilization that I write about above
- enjoy your all expense paid trip to paradise

- if you can sign that ban on dihydrogen-monoxide, i hear quite a few dignitaries have already signed it....that stuff contributes to acid rain, is a principal driver in the greenhouse effect and is lethal if you breathe even a teaspoon full of it!

- anyway - enjoy enjoy enjoy. The rest of us peasants will work work work to pay for your trip.

It is kind of absurd to read an article about deforestation in a British magazine. Britain itself is probably one of the world leaders in deforestation. Today 10% of the land area in the UK is forrest, down from perhaps 70-80% a few thousand years ago. Even the densely populated major countries on the continent such as Germany, France of Italy boast a far higher fraction land covered by forests. So please, before discussing de- or forestation of any other country start by advocating a MAJOR FORESTATION PROGRAMME FOR THE UK! A reasonable first goal would be 25% land coverage. Not only would this be a fantastic improvement for many species in Britain. Also humans would greatly benefit from a health and recreational point of view. Good luck!

I thought the Economist was a news magazine but there wasn't even a "new" let alone a more than one new pieces of information in this column.

I know the topic of Climate Change is so important that a 'summit' had to be held in a luxery resort - I would feel that the hearts of the pure green campaingers were pure if they held it in the less hospitable locale of the slums of Calcutta or some other impovished local supposedly to be overwhelmed by climate change.

Could your publication define for us whether "hot air" is a renewable energy source? Further cwhether it is carbon neutral? I believe most thinking people turn away in disgust at the time and money wasted on this modern bogeyman.

Avoiding deforestation is an entirely worthy goal. How about aiding it with another goal: re-forestation?

Both goals suffer from a lack of appropriate incentives.

Instead of centralized control of de- and re-forestation, how about a new incentives regime. Countries should commit to using only farmed timber, and in general farm products only from "approved" farmlands, and no other.

By criminalizing the exploitation of virgin timber-lands, we would create an incentive to use and reuse existing farmlands.

Richer countries would also commit to massive re-forestation. Say 5% of existing land mass (on average)?

This is a regime that would place the most onus for enforcement on richer communities, not on poor communities.

A distinction should be made between deforestation & responsibily harvesting forests. Deforestation is bad, but harvesting forests responsibly is the best climate action plan available.
One tonne of responsibly harvested forest product (lumber, pulp,etceteras) takes three tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The best & cheapest carbon sequestration availible.
Use & promote lumber & wood products, they help the ecology of the earth.
Forests either need to burn (forest fires) or they need to be harvested. You can't put out the fires & not harvest the mature wood or you end up with Yellowstone's. REMEMBER YELLOWSTONE!

Land in the West is viewed as another commodity to be bought and sold for the benefit of its owners. It is impossible to put restrictions on the exploitation of forest land without limiting the benefits the land's owners feel entitled to (to farm it, for instance). To impose official restrictions and make them work, some compensation scheme is required. If carbon taxes take on, they could be the origin of the funding source to make the compensation possible.

I live in up state New York on the boarder of New England . Over 100 years ago our part of the country was 80 % cleared of forests .Today it is 80% forest We cut trees on our farm and every year there are many more and bigger trees.No one had to plan it it just happens in the natural cycle of things and changing economics.
So the world is always in flux and changing and in some ways the same.

@ justanonymous: "Ahh yes the poor Economist Journalist was forced to go to Cancun to cover the Climate Change summit where 15,000 people are basking under mostly sunny skies and 75 degrees by a resort paradise where they are fed Lobster by the boatfuls. [...] The rest of us peasants will work work work to pay for your trip."

If you don't subscribe to the Economist, then no, you were not forced to pay for the trip. If you do subscribe to the Economist, then unless it was somehow involuntary you were *still* not forced to pay for the trip. In either case, your whining about how unfair it is that peasants were forced to pay for this trip is completely silly, given that it the trip was taken by a private citizen using money that was voluntarily given to him (or her) by other private citizens.

The bit on deforestation may indeed be a bit tricky in its execution, but slowing deforestation would serve multiple purposes beside reducing net carbon emissions. For biodiversity, slowing deforestation and increasing reforestation makes a big difference: you can't compare undisturbed old growth forest with tree plantations.

At any rate, there seems to be a deal and the expectations were so low that the fact itself is already a reason for joy. Even though, as Bolivia pointed out, this seems to set us up for a hazardous 4C temperature rise.

The inhabitants of this planet were very well aware of the need to fight deforestation long before the climate change hoax acquired global dimensions.

If the warming alarmists - both from the bureaucratic, 'scientific', and NGO sides - cannot come with anything better than this, here's a deal: they shut down all the stations along the line by which their gravy train runs (starting from the carbon trade Ponzi scheme), repeal all the additional "green" taxes they introduced and stop feeding to adult people porkies about their ability to influence solar activity by singing Kumbaya.

Nature unfortunately does not care about what we have as our "common sense" notion of how it should work; it will play by its own rules regardless of how much we champion that "common sense" says it should be acting otherwise.

As the World Bank Director for the Caribbean, and as an individual who cares about the environment, I believe that Guyana’s pristine forests are its most valuable natural asset and provide critical environmental services to the world.

We at the World Bank want to help preserve Guyana’s vast tropical forests and that is the reason why we have agreed to become the Trustee for the GRIF multidonor trust fund (Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund) at the request of Norway and Guyana. This is a pioneering pilot effort to pay for environmental services.

However, I would like to correct a factual error in your blog which states that GRIF funds were paid to the World Bank a year ago for “onwards transmission” to Guyana. In reality at that time, November 2009, the Governments of Guyana and Norway signed an agreement, which set out how the two countries would work together to define a model for REDD+. At that stage, the financial mechanism to manage the GRIF was yet to be defined. Norway and Guyana invited the World Bank to discuss the financial mechanism for managing these funds and a series of tri-party discussions led to an agreement.

On October 9, 2010, an administration agreement was signed between Norway and the World Bank – with the endorsement of Guyana – which established the World Bank as Trustee to the GRIF. The first tranche of the GRIF funds was transferred to the World Bank only on October 13, 2010.

On November 24, 2010, a Steering Committee comprised of Norway and Guyana held its first meeting but no projects were presented for potential GRIF funding. As Trustee we cannot transfer any funds to the project partners – such as the UN and the Inter American Development Bank – before getting the green light from the Steering Committee. Up to now, the Committee has not instructed us to transfer any funds. We cannot act faster than the Committee itself.

Since the funds are considered development assistance, Norway wants to make sure that funds are used in the most transparent and effective way. Once transferred to project partners, the agreement with Norway specifies that GRIF funds must be spent applying adequate financial management, safeguards and controls of the partner entity selected by Norway and Guyana.

"Nature unfortunately does not care about what we have as our "common sense" notion of how it should work; it will play by its own rules regardless of how much we champion that "common sense" says it should be acting otherwise."

One hundred per cent agree! You're right on the mark.

Just a small addition: it (the nature) equally does not care about hot-air talk in Cancun, or Rio, or elsewhere; and regardless of all social engineering and carbon taxing schemes the warming crooks invent, it will play by its own rules as it did for billions of years.